Ducks in a Row

One of the things I see in various communities for getting one's life in order or decluttering is the concept that there are some people who are Born Organized. That is just so wrong.

First of all, it's definitely possible to have developed systems for managing one aspect of your life that work really well, while other parts of your life are in total chaos. It's not about being born to one level of organization or not, but about how successful the systems you developed as you were maturing happened to be. Because we develop these systems before we really need to put them to the test, we have no way of knowing which ones are the right ones or not, unless we happen to have parents who recognize this and help us develop good systems.

Here's my example: Noel is a very tidy person, instinctively. He tends to fuss about cleaning things up, and moments after we finish eating he'll be stacking the plates up to take to the kitchen, no matter whether we're in the middle of a conversation or not. He likes a nice, tidy house, and he pushes me to keep the house that way. I, on the other hand, am a very untidy person. I've learned new tidy habits as an adult, and certainly have come at the decluttering thing from the cluttered/collector end of the spectrum. For me, keeping the house tidy is a real effort, and I had to develop systems with very strict rules. I had a side business for a few years where I helped other people declutter their homes, because that helped me keep on track with my own work.

On the other hand, I naturally keep track of time commitments in my head, know what's on my calendar for today, tomorrow, next week, etc. at any moment without checking it, and know how long it will take to get there. This is something I do without really knwoing how I do it. This skill is a huge struggle for Noel, who ended up having to adopt a set of strict rules and an external reminder system (he uses Franklin Covey's Seven Habits system), and in fact has become an instructor so he can teach the system to others.

A lot of people look at Noel's use of the planner and are amazed at how natural it seems, as if he were born using it. But it took a great deal of effort on his part to find the right system, and learn it and practise it until it was internal to him. He still falls off the wagon and has to get back on. Many of my former clients looked with awe on my ability to show them how to remove clutter and clear out large areas of their homes, but it has been a real effort for me to manage my own clutter and find the things that can leave the house without pain. I still find myself hoarding things, and have to correct that. Getting back on the wagon definitely gets easier with time, but it's not natural by any means.

The reality is that nobody is completely Born Organized, and the moniker is one that is most harmful to the people using it. If organization is something you are born with, then no amount of system creation can make up for that. But the reality is that all of us have some part of our lives that is totally chaotic and harmful to us, and we all have systems that don't work that we could improve on. We do tend to notice when people have systems that work better than our broken ones, but somehow we seem not to notice when other people are unable to manage something we find easy. I had to learn how to understand Noel's schedule issues because the idea that somebody could not keep their calendar in their head was foreign to me.

We all develop these systems for managing our lives when we are kids, then have to rely on them as adults. Some systems work better than others, and we can all learn from that (though some systems that work well for one person don't work as well for another). Other systems clearly do not work, and the only way around that is to develop a new system to fix the problem. We should not focus on putting ourselves down for not having a perfect system for everything, and definitely should not imagine that there are some other, perfect people out there who somehow have it all figured out naturally. That's a defeatist attitude and it just so happens to be flat out wrong. We're all human beings with flaws and perfections.